Innovative nondestructive ultrasonic testing and analysis for FRP piping

Fiber reinforced plastics (FRP) are being extensively used in chemical vessels, power plants and process piping sectors. Typically these are fabricated via filament winding or hand lay-up and subject to a range of defects such as collection of microvoids, disbonds, fiber misalignment, resin rich, resin starved areas etc. Access to FRP pipes used in the process and energy industries is oftentimes limited to single side. UTComp utilizes advanced ultrasonic, non-destructive testing technology to acquire data for health monitoring of FRP structures. This data gathered is then evaluated through custom software and analysis. In the present work, FRP pipes ranging from 8" to 24" length and 6" to 8" diameter supplied from number of sources was evaluated by ultrasonic NDE. The FRP pipes were marked in circumferential grids and time domain signals were recorded from 1" diameter ultrasonic transducer of 0.5 MHz resonant frequency transducers in conjunction with an Olympus DL ultrasonic system. The data was reduced by extracting the raw ordered pairs of magnitude and time that constitute the A-scan from a flaw detector. The raw data was further processed to provide prediction of the ratio of actual elastic modulus to theoretical elastic modulus.